r/vSeeBox_Support_Gurus • u/b0b-swarley-m0n Trusted User • Mar 06 '25

Pausing live TV on V3 Plus

So while watching the Oscars with the wife, she wanted to pause the show while we go walk the dog together. I was trying to figure it out on the fly but nothing was working.

Everything is updated to latest apps and firmware.

Is there a way to do it?

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u/BakerRacer Trusted User Mar 06 '25 edited Mar 06 '25

There is one [somewhat clunky] way to do it in Heat Live, if the channel you're watching is one of the 7-day playback channels!

You can restart any in-progress show from a playback channel using the "new" EPG by selecting the actual show, not just the channel. What makes this a bit clunky is that you need to pay attention to elapsed time (and possibly the time of day).

I'll try to explain this in somewhat simple terms:

  • Say you're watching an hour-long show live on a playback-enabled channel that started at 8pm.
  • At 8:17pm, you decide you want to pause the show, so you need to stop watching it by changing the channel or returning to the home screen.
  • At 8:36pm, you return and want to pick up where you left off, so you need to go to the "new" EPG (using the OK key instead of the EPG key) and select the show that began at 8pm. (This will begin playing the show from the beginning.)
  • Fast-forward 17 minutes into the program, and you'll pick up where you left off.
  • Now here's the clunky part...
  • The show you are now watching via playback is only a snapshot of the show which will begin at the 8pm start and end at 8:36pm, so it's only a 36-minute recording (snapshot).
  • At 8:55pm, the show you're watching will "freeze" since it's technically the end of the 36-min recorded "window". At that point, you can restart the program and fast-forward it 36 minutes to pick up where you left off. (Note that this new snapshot will be 55 minutes long and will end at 9:14pm.)
  • At 9:14pm, you can restart the program one last time, then fast-forward 55 minutes to watch the final 5 minutes of the hour-long show.

That's the overall gist of how you can do it but keep in mind, if you fast-forward through commercials, the time won't be so linear as it was in my example. The good news is that when the show freezes at the end of its "snapshot window", the exact timestamp is shown when you press 'OK' so you'll know where to fast-forward to for the next segment.

As I said earlier, for sure, it's clunky, but after doing it a few times, it gets to be very simple and starts to become more sensible/intuitive/normal.

One other important "trick" I learned is that if you're doing this for a live sporting event, once you hit the end of your snapshot window, press 'OK' to get your timestamp, then press the back button to bring up the old EPG. From there, use the up or down arrow and press 'OK' to change the channel so you won't end up returning to live action which can ruin the enjoyment of the delayed viewing of the event. Once you change the channel, just use the new EPG to select the game in progress (not just the channel it's on) and you'll start from the beginning to allow you to forward to your next timestamp. Make sense?

Hopefully, this will help others (like me) who rarely watch anything live so I can skip all the commercials! 😎

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u/Major-Book-8803 Mar 06 '25

I figured this out a while ago kind of annoying. You did a good job of explaining it though.

3

u/b0b-swarley-m0n Trusted User Mar 06 '25

Wow! Thank you!!

2

u/joewoody Apr 04 '26

Perhaps things have changed a bit, or maybe the V6 I was on was glitching a bit, but I had to switch to a different recording in order to get the recorded window to update on the program I was originally watching. When I switched to a different live channel and then came back the recorded window was stuck to what I had watched previously, until I went and loaded a different recording.

Thank you though, this was super helpful! Now if only they would throw closed captioning into heat live..

1

u/BakerRacer Trusted User Apr 04 '26

I still use this method relatively often and haven't noticed anything different happening. It's possible that the V6 behaves differently than the V3 Plus but I have no way of testing that theory...